IRS Eager to Tap Orwellian Data Warehouses

You know how the government’s Knowledge Gathering Bureau is trying to pull all
of the world’s databases, public and private, into one giant überdatabase — in
order to protect our children from evil madmen who hate freedom?

That way they can use computers to pull together all sorts of information
about all of us — each bit possibly innocent in and of itself, but in the
aggregate perhaps fitting the profile of a terrorist. Like
this
family — whose high electricity use and habit of waiting until the last
minute to put the garbage out on the curb marked them as likely marijuana
farmers.

They weren’t. And they’re a little upset at the police raid. “I understand
they feel something isn’t appropriate here,” said Carlsbad Police Lieutenant
Bill Rowland, “but it is very much consistent with how search warrants are
prepared.”

In the future, the police won’t have to rely on such vague data points as
electricity use and trash collection patterns — they’ll have your
TiVo viewing patterns and
Safeway Club Card receipts to help them figure out
just what sort of terrorist you might be in danger of becoming.

And
the IRS is enthusiastic
about these new advances in information technology. They’re eager to share
their data with other law enforcement agencies — and they want fresh sets of
data for their automated investigations too:

“It’s the new trend. It’s where everybody is headed,” said Verenda Smith,
government affairs associate at the Federation of Tax Administrators, which
represents state tax agencies. “The greatest value of these systems is in
finding patterns that the human eye isn’t that good at seeing.”

In Massachusetts, for example, the state tax agency can scan a
U.S. Customs and
Border Protection database of people who paid duties on big-ticket items
entering the country — so anyone who fails to pay the state the required 5
percent “use tax” gets flagged.

The state has also tried comparing motor vehicle registration data with tax
returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but
declaring only a small income, Revenue Commissioner Alan LeBovidge said…

The new tools have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in increased tax
collections, officials say. But the government’s growing sophistication at
collecting and scrutinizing data about taxpayers is sounding alarms among
privacy advocates.

The Federation of Tax Administrators doesn’t keep a definitive list of states
using the technology, but Massachusetts, Texas, California, Washington,
Virginia, Iowa and Florida are known to be leaders in the trend, which began
in the late 1990s. The
IRS is
also using the techniques.…

The tax agencies’ “data warehouses” can stockpile data from state and federal
agencies and, in some cases, private sources. And they are using new tools to
analyze the data, including “data-mining” software that can scrutinize
mountains of information to find patterns or establish relationships.…

LeBovidge now unabashedly dreams of a day when people won’t even have to fill
out their income tax forms: The government will have so much information
about people’s finances that it can simply fill out tax forms and mail them
to taxpayers to be endorsed.

California has taken a step in that direction, mailing 23,000 pre-filled-out
forms to taxpayers who have simpler types of returns, a small fraction of the
state’s 15 million business and private returns, said Denise Azimi,
spokeswoman for the California Franchise Tax Board,

She said an upgrade to California’s “non-filer” system that began in
the late 1990s offered the state an
increased data warehousing and analysis capability. The system brings
together multiple databases, including records from the
IRS,
state agencies, banks and brokerage houses to try to identify tax cheats.

Over at
Living on
Less they’re discussing the finding that “about half of Americans
feel that they do not make enough money to afford the things they need. That
includes 39% of people making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.”

These are people making two to four times the median income in the United
States — and making enough to put them in the crustiest of the upper crust
world-wide. So where does their feeling of being on the edge of financial
disaster come from?

Is it just some sort of pathology — like the way anorexics see their
protruding hips and ribs as more fatty lumps in need of reduction? Or are the
expensive demands of modern life really requiring more money than most people
can earn?

One convincing argument blames mass media. Humans are wired, says the
argument, to look around themselves for status symbols and compare their own
with the social median to see how they’re doing. But today’s humans are
comparing themselves not to their peers, but to a combination of their peers
and the humans they see on television. People on television are
disproportionally wealthy people with lots of leisure time who engage in
expensive pasttimes. They frequently purchase and own expensive things.

All of the advertisements on television are advertising different things, but
it’s also true that most of them are advertising the same thing: that your
life will be improved in some way if you buy something. More often than not,
this is done by example: a brief vignette is shown, in which a purchased
product brightens somebody’s day: The beer drinker gets the girl, the
SUV driver
smiles at her well-defended passenger child, the former dandruff sufferer
fearlessly dons the black turtleneck.

If advertising works on a small scale — to sell a particular product — how
must it work on a large scale? There is a shared message of advertisements:
Something’s wrong with you, buy something to fix it, you’ll be glad you did.
That message is repeated over and over, day in and day out. The products
change, the selling stays the same.

So when someone who’s making $75,000 thinks that they’re just getting by, or
wonders why the credit card bill never gets paid off, maybe this is why.
Nobody can keep pace with the relentless purchasing of the media versions of
people we’re using to evaluate our place in the scheme of things.

“The only thing we could do in any way to stop this happening is just to stop
working,” a middle-aged man in the balcony suggested, talking about the war.
“Then they’ll have no money to fund guns.”

This was, in fact, the logical extension of a point that Moore makes often,
that American and British citizens are responsible for the war because it is
being funded by taxes; but Moore seemed taken aback by such a radical notion.
A general strike!

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